Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 149976
spec file changelog date format is overly restrictive
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:01 EST
Description of problem: The %changelog date format disallows dates before 1997. Fair enough for RedHat packages perhaps, but it surprised me when I aggregated some old changelogs for one of my projects into a spec file. The offending line of code is in build/parseChangelog.c: if (time.tm_year < 1997 || time.tm_year >= 3000) return -1; Its trivial, and looks pretty safe to relax this, say to a more unix-epoch-like 1970, although all the way to 1900 may well be ok. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): rpm-4.3.2-21 How reproducible: Reliable. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Put a line with a date pre-1997 in a spec file changelog. 2. Build rpm. Actual results: error: bad date in %changelog: Thu Jan 05 1995 Michael Pope Expected results: It should just work:-). Additional info:
No rpm package existed before 1997 because rpm had not been written. While relaxing the restriction is quite easy to implement, it will cause build failures with versions of rpm that do not have the same (overly restrictive) policy. I'll make the change in CVS head but it will be quite a few years before a less restrictive date check is widley deployed.